Medical Company Establishes Education Center In Mumbai

September 2, 2010 - Varian Medical Systems has established its first education center in India to train medical physicists and technologists working on the company's advanced cancer treatment systems.

The center in Mumbai, equipped with 16 planning system workstations and the VERT training system for radiotherapy treatment simulations, will enable the country's growing number of radiotherapists and medical physicists to train without having to travel overseas. The official opening, which was attended by Kanta Chokkra, president of the Association of Medical Physicists of India, was carried out by Kolleen Kennedy, Varian's VP Customer Support Services.

"This training center will give us the opportunity to customize our training solutions to the specific needs of Indian clinicians bringing, in the long term, added value to their practices," says Michael Sandhu, Varian's regional head of operations.

"There are fewer than 400 radiotherapy machines in India and almost half of these are outdated cobalt machines," adds Sandhu, "but we are seeing a rapid investment in new equipment and many Indian hospitals are now able to offer the most advanced treatments available in the world, such as image-guided RapidArc radiotherapy and radiosurgery."

RapidArc delivers precise image-guided IMRT (intensity modulated radiotherapy) up to four times faster than conventional IMRT.
According to estimates from the Cancer Foundation of India, India has 2 to 2.5 million cancer cases requiring treatment at any point in time and almost a million new cancer cases are diagnosed there each year. Cancer diagnoses are expected to continue rising in India as the health care system expands and more cases are detected.

The Mumbai project is the fifth such education and training center established by Varian globally.